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Have a PhD in History; but am currently unemployed, and have been underemployed and unemployed since receiving that doctorate degree.
Have traveled around the world and have lived in various cities across the world, mostly in Europe and in the Americas. Served four years in the US military as a non-combattant.

In the contemporary USA there is a serious subculture that mixes together gun owners, actors and historians. They call themselves the reenactors. These historical period actors represent the aficionados of old military costumes, weapons, and martial movements. They regularly follow the sacred dates of battle memorials. Other tasks include interpreting for museum exhibitions and extras for historical episodes on cable TV. They do reenactments at historical sites, while replaying personal battle accounts. They truly do live the history and experience the combat flutters – even without the dead and mangled human bodies lying around them.

Across this United States, there are thousands of local historical societies doing their parts for regional memory. There also thousands of mini-museums, which feature glass cases of local artifacts and human stories. There also exist live nostalgia sites, and especially in the West and in the South, featuring dudes and gals dressed up in historical costumes. Along the ‘done up’ stage, tourists can see the period furniture, walk in the local stores, and visit the bars and restaurants. They can also watch the dressed-up people ‘doing their stuff the old way.’ We should not forget the medieval lore of Renaissance Festivals too. No other nation on Earth has so many museums – and museums for every imaginable taste inside of our tiny Earth universe.

Museums were actually a new invention to the human condition. Museums were not part of the large urban dynamic until the late 1700s, eighteenth-century. People hadn’t the need for museums during most of human history. Life, art, conflict, love and death were all around them. They just didn’t need a special space in order to experience their lives. The actuality of living worked fine – filled with surprises, sublime joy and tragedies.

The official founder of museums was none other than the ego-maniac dictator of the French Empire, (1798-1815), Napoleon Bonaparte. Like a good state thug, he just stole the grand art works of Italy, especially some of the more famous paintings, after his army had invaded the country. His army transported them to Paris, and then placed most of them inside an old Royal Palace in Paris, called the Louvre. Now every major and minor city across the world – has its very own, sacred ‘museum’ space. Bad habits are certainly addictive. But the irony of ironies, art mausoleums of the dead, commonly called, ‘museums,’ have become synonymous with modern, high culture.

Returning to the American reenactors, they generally prefer particular reenactments. Their favorites are two wars in US history: the Revolutionary War and the Civil War. How many reenactments does one see representing the War of 1812 or the Mexican War? There is a definite reason for the reenactors’ preferences.

They prefer these two wars because they exemplified the good side to American culture: the right to complete and total personal freedom, and the cultural action of honor to defend such rights. The reenactors don’t just act and play for the sake of historical posterity; they also reenact because contemporary Amerikan culture represents the direct opposite of true freedom – and the fight for one’s honor to defend it. Only small sections of the American South still give obeisance to the cultural value of honor.

American culture has always had a terrible link to cruelty, but over a hundred years ago, true liberty and the defense of honor made the American a respected world citizen, violently birthed out of a newly created republic. Americans shared these values with most of the nations of the world. Nowadays unfortunately, only the day-to-day cruelty remains.

Global monopoly capitalism, state-public-coerced schooling, corporate media-advertising-Hollywood garbage, the prison-gulag, ‘legal’ institutional powers, the ultimate police-gang state, and the military-spy-industrial-war complex have all done their insidious parts in transforming American society into a low and diseased culture. Due to this terribly diseased state of Amerikan Imperial culture, the Empire is rotting from the inside. The terrible news is that the sociopaths that hold and manage political power in the States – also know this.

Actual American culture features the horrible diseases of immaturity, boredom, indiscretion and ignorance, mostly due to Amerikan public schooling and the corporate media TV-Hollywood junta. Watching the momentous crap on American cable television, from reality TV shows, to making money shows, to TV shopping channels, can convince even the most patriotic observer on the actual cultural rot.

The other current diseases in the culture represent gluttony, fear-distrust, frustration, and explosive anger: all of which come from extreme monopoly capitalism. Mention leads to the obesity epidemic, the fast food nightmare found in every town and city in the States, the overuse of psychotropic medications that lead to mass shootings, and the street hustling and petty crime that plague most of America’s cities.

The most life threatening disease found inside the culture is cowardice. This mortal killer comes from decades of succumbing to the authoritarian police, militarized surveillance state.

The word ‘culture’ originally comes from the word, agriculture. Just like people use the earth to create foods, cooking and the arts of the table, culture owes its first connections to the holy earth. The most durable cultures have always been the societies that have used the earth for their daily benefits, and yet they have also respected the earth and taken care of it. They understood the balance between use and abuse. Their religious practices always referred back to the earth. We can think on the Native nations in the Americas before the arrival of the European invaders.

Yet, culture can also exist outside of any connection to the earth due to the human ability to mentally create, through both imaginative fantasy and the adoption of complex language structures and vocabularies. With the rise of monotheistic religions on the world stage, such as Christianity and Islam, human cultures created new arts, sciences, idioms and civil societies. These cultural changes help explain Modern Europe’s obsessions with its modern fighting words, such as language, class, people, race and nation. As long as there exists the concept of ‘Europe,’ these fighting terms will not go away any time soon.

I remember when I lived in Europe, a few Europeans had stated to me that America had no culture. Compared to their thousands of years of conflict and history, American culture did not come close to the high levels of Europe. However, every subgroup, region, city, society, club and clique has a culture, even if it is a superficial or weak one. The difference in cultures relate to the various cultural levels, whether high or low. There do exist hierarchies of cultures. And cultures, like the earth and people, can get infections diseases – and even epidemics. This is the current, unfortunate state of the Amerikan Imperial culture.

A very good way to measure the general culture level, within a particular place or region, regards local festivals and celebrations.

One summer, I attended an annual festival in a small, western American town. The weather was beautiful and I was looking forward to feeling the magic of the small town west. What I received instead was lots of boredom, fear of controls and ignorance about the actual history of the region. I didn’t learn anything new; although, there were lots of vendors trying to get me to spend a lot of money.

I heard there was a night concert downtown, so I walked around the downtown area, and found out there was no concert at all. Apparently, the town politicians mandated no loud music after sundown in the fear of attracting people drinking alcohol and having fun. The next day, I walked around the downtown area again, and all I saw were stands, either selling local junk trinkets or genetically modified laced greasy, fast food. I also spotted the traveling carnival rides. Almost all the locals walking around were either fat or obese.

The rides were mostly nausea producing machines, meaning they moved round and round and round, while the rest of the carnival structures featured ‘carnival games,’ or really scam productions to steal people’s money, like throwing a heavy ball into a small, tilted basket, all in order to receive cheap and bogus prizes. Even if the person wanted to just walk around the carnival, they still had to pay up front for just entering the festival zone. On one side street off the Main drag, I observed that there were more police walking around than actual locals. I was so scared of the police presence that I left the area.

I returned again, the next day, to experience the town’s premier music concert. I walked to the park off the main drag. As I stepped toward the park’s entrance, a security staff guy then approached me and told me that I had to pay a good amount of money in order to enter. He also said that I could only buy their overpriced alcohol from the inside vendors, and that they had to search both my body and personal bag for pre-entry. If I got too drunk, then the police would have to arrest me.

I was so shocked about ‘the rules’ that I waked away. I also noticed a heavy local police presence around the park entrance. As I looked over from the outside, the band arrived on stage, and when they started playing, the music was absolutely horrible. The band played Country music cover songs, with a background player for other instruments, such as piano, banjo or accordion, and the musicians used music stands, so they could sing the lyrics. I also noticed that the crowd was sparse and almost nobody danced, except for a few older couples. This so-called festival had a theme related to the town’s history, and yet, I learned nothing from this event. The festival was a bust – and so was the town.

This town was dying like so many other towns out in the American west, and it failed to reinvent itself in order to bring in more tourist dollars. That terrible festival represented the same terrible level of general culture found in the town.

No matter what the local politicians cook up in their deceitful minds, if the local town possesses a low culture, then the place is on the path of dying badly. During that particular festival, I experienced more fear, boredom, disgust and ignorance than anything else. I had really experienced some of America’s mortal cultural diseases.

This is the reason culture is so important to people around the world. Culture represents the totality of our body expressions, values, productions, actions, words and contradictions. Culture, like the planets around the suns, and the moons around the planets, revolves around our difficult lives. We all possess, live and create culture. And culture always goes through movement and changes, just like the universe. Finally, culture also has ties to conflict and resistance.

For example, during an annual religious festival, in the year 1580, in the town of Romans, France, the local people moved into revolt mode. The party started off with some hard-drinking and soon transformed into a liberating revolution!

In contemporary Amerika, some urban hipsters, intolerant leftists, rich liberals and other pathetic snobs like to focus their disgust on to the Revolutionary War and Civil War reenactors. Yet, it is truly their hypocritical, cowardly and low cultural lives that make most people gasp. As long as people breathe, they will create culture. The ones that move culture into resistance will create the highest and most powerful one. Meanwhile in the Amerikan Empire, the sociopaths holding power watch in fear.

As we Anarchists lose tolerance for the repetitive boredom, ignorance, and media fear campaigns vomiting out of the crap television programs, corporate radio broadcasts, and Hollywood movies – we can create alternatives spaces using similar visual mediums. As we perceive the endless public signs and billboards that advertise useless crap, threaten us, attack and harass our daily lives, we can avoid their public spaces and take alternative routes, poster or paint over them, or even take the small signs down. If a state or corporate-funded cultural space wants to rob us so they can make a cheap profit, then we can set up an another space open to marginalized forms of artistic expression – whether on a deserted sidewalk, in a basement or in a public park. The culture of resistance always breathes new life into the general revolution – and offers a marvelous and new sense of freedom.

We Anarchists have made the first steps in resistance and freedom just through our rejection of such a corrupt system. We understand the truth on both life and death, and we see through the sociopaths’ methods of social control and their criminality.

After twelve years of living overseas in Europe, vagabonding and traveling around the world, I decided to return to the Amerikan school system. I wanted to get the top degree as a historian, a PhD. Yet, I always hated the Amerikan system of ‘education.’ Like most people in the country, most of my Amerikan schooling experiences were quite negative.

I had thought that studying for a PhD, or a useless doctorate degree, would signify a totally different experience. I would be able to read what I wanted, and study various themes and topics that interested me. I could write passionately about what truly fascinated me related to historical stuff. I could then become a professor too.

I finally did receive my longed for PhD six years later – but I was terribly wrong. I was good at history, but common sense kicked me in the butt. The rot of the education system had even infected the deadbeat world of Amerikan university graduate school.

From daycare-head start, nursery ‘schools’ to the doctoral program schools in Amerikan universities, bad education reigns through dirty social control. The main culprit represents the mandatory and compulsory state ‘public’ school. The Amerikan forced and coerced schooling system exists solely for training obedient, institutionalized slaves. The elites wanted, and have continued to want, mental cowards that follow orders throughout their bad employment careers. The Amerikan school system currently runs like a minimum security jail system confined within the bureaucratic iron cage.

I’ll never forget my first few weeks on the Amerikan university campus after being out of the ‘school system’ for over ten years. The university charged and extorted students for almost everything that they needed on campus. There were counseling fees, student bookstore fees, student union fess, building fees, computer resource fees, etcetera, and even teaching grad students had to pay for tuition.

In the Amerikan Empire, the state, inclusive of federal, state and city governments, normally tax the citizens incessantly. However, the Amerikan university had perfected this art of taxation, charges and fines, which possessed even greater reach than the state – since tuition costs rose by the rate of inflation times twenty each year.

The university also had a long list of fees and sanctions that required continual outlays of payments, such as parking fees, for both cars and bicycles, late registration fines, drinking alcohol on campus fines, skateboarding fines, and the poor undergrads that lived in the dorms had it worse. Their lives were exactly like prisoners in minimum security jails. They had to inform the security staff when both leaving and arriving in the buildings. Any minor room infraction could land them serious fines, ending up homeless – or even arrested by the campus donut brigade.

I was really shocked when I saw one peculiar ‘innovation.’ The university had a full-fledged and legal, autonomous police force, with its very own detective and jail, cops openly carried semi-automatic guns, high-powered shotguns, and the unit had an armored vehicle with drug sniffing dogs. These cops were often young and hard-core. They regularly rode and walked around the campus looking to harass and bust both unwary students and strangers that ventured on the campus spaces.

While the cops kept the campus on lockdown, surveillance cameras were prevalent everywhere. It wasn’t as bad as a casino or a prison, but it came close. The vigilance cameras were in the hallways, library bookcase areas, and they even faced the front doors of restrooms.

A terrible ambience of fear and distrust pervaded the entire university campus community. The university bosses or administrators managed the whole operation from the top down. The Regents or Trustees possessed the legal management of the university, so they appointed the president. The president next appointed his or her own assistants, and in turn, they appointed the provosts, vice provosts and the other campus directorships. Meanwhile, the provosts appointed the deans and the assistant deans, and the deans appointed their assistants. Almost none of these six figure salaried administrators, and in the case of the president, millionaires, taught classes. They generally attended meetings and passed e-mails to each other.

The administrative chiefs often delegated the heavy university workload, innocuously called service requirements, onto the tenured professor managers. These administrators could dismiss any worker or terminate any job position at will – even if the victim had tenure.

This American university system resembled the old Communist Central Committees of Eastern Europe, or the old Corporations run by the family juntas of the Rockefellers and the Vanderbilts at the turn of the century. The top directors also referred to ‘their university’ as a not-for-profit corporations. The irony apparently escaped them.

The tenured professor managers were quite disappointing as both workers and people. They often acted in a cowardly manner. They never argued with the administrators, and never fought back against most university injustices. The few who did fight back, ended up fired. Most tenured university professors transformed themselves into institutional drones.

Most of them had already transformed themselves into servile workers through faithfully attending the Amerikan Empire school system.

The worst of the bunch were the other graduate students. I had thought that my fellow students would emerge as intellectual colleagues where deep discussions on history, culture and politics were commonplace. The opposite was true. With so little money at the bottom of the pyramid and with most of us gaining horrible salaries at the poverty level, every other graduate student was a competitor for the meager amounts of available money. Hatred ruled inside of those tiny and claustrophobic grad student offices.

The hatred and anger seethed at all levels on the campus. Administrators often blew their tops against recalcitrant professors. Some professors went ballistic against grad students. The grad students showed their rage through harshly grading the papers of the undergraduates – who represented the ‘lazy’ students. Yet it was the laziest of the bunch, the administrators, who received the greatest payouts. And from there, the pyramid of tension, hate and control regularly flushed down into the university cesspool.

I began to hear other horrible stories and legends. A tenured, professor-pervert got away with his sexual indiscretions due to his ability to garner outside grant money for the university, i.e., the administration. The uni donut cops managed a corrupt practice of busting drivers around the campus at night for Driving Under the Influence of Alcohol, (DUI) money; meanwhile, some of those same cops would get drunk and then receive free rides home. University administrators would physically threaten attorneys, coaches and professors that refused to bend to their wills.

I also heard about some departments where cowardly professor bullies formed mob actions against their non-conformist colleagues. The university environment functioned under some of the worst institutionalized behavior in the education industry. Only the Amerikan prison gulag or the US Post Office seemed worse off – and yet, I had voluntarily entered this sick world.

I stayed on for six years longer until I received my PhD. I had no where else to go. I was good at history, reading and writing. But I paid a serious price for my desperate and stubborn will to continue and finish graduate school. I too fell victim to the pettiness, the competitive meanness, the nasty envy, and worst of all, the frustrated anger. Yet, I prided myself in resisting such institutional vices. It took me four years after receiving my PhD to fully heal my mind from such a harsh ‘educational’ experience.

After reaching the long sought doctoral degree, I then realized something even more sinister – the Amerikan university had become a rotten extension of the Amerikan high school, which in turn, birthed itself out of the infernal concoction of Amerikan forced schooling, or ‘the public school system.’

The mandatory public school system was actually a recent historical phenomenon. About a hundred years ago in the USA, few people attended the local public schools. Kids might attend a local school-house, but the school was completely autonomous, under a schoolmaster or even a local teacher. Most children attended for a few years, but it often ended when they had to work at their parent’s businesses, farms or small ranches. Children mainly learned their life and work skills from their parents.

At about the same time, Amerika’s elite business capos, such as the Rockefellers, began to lobby the state governments for forced, mandatory schooling. They wanted a more ‘disciplined’ workforce, and so they united with German Empire trained, public intellectuals, such as John Dewey, to set up ‘school boards,’ ‘child labor laws,’ and ‘teacher colleges.’ The Amerikan federal and state apparatuses supported this school system because they watched the spectacular military power of the German Empire, or the Second Reich, which had compulsory state schooling. Other world empires, had also utilized this successful school model, such as the French Empire and the British Empire.

By the 1920s, most US states had some form of mandatory public school law, which gave states the legal right to take away parents’ kids, and hold them against their wills for a good party of the day. The elites however, such as the Rockefellers, never sent their kids to those obligatory public schools; instead, their sons, and eventually, daughters too, attended elite college preparatory private schools, and afterwards, attended the ivy league, elite universities.

The requisite state, Amerikan public schools had more administrators than teachers. They often sat in offices, never taught, and received great salaries, benefits and severance pay packages. Under them were the ‘education leaders,’ or principals, who also made very good money.

In order to earn a little money, I did some substitute teaching at some local public schools. During my period breaks, I overheard teachers recounting some outrageous stories of corrupt Board of Education bosses, often coming into the main office for a few hours and then leaving for the rest of the day. And these bosses made six figure salaries! At the same time, most of the teachers that I saw in the teacher’s lounge seemed tired, worn out, weird and their pay was average. The teachers did most of the work, since the principals never really taught any classes.

Working as a substitute also pained me to view the poor children harassed, categorized and ordered around by the school authorities. Bullying was rampant and the violence between students often exploded into nasty fights. The corporate media liars always blamed school violence on bad kids, bad parents and bad teachers. But I saw first hand that it was the institutional violence of enforced schooling, which had started this nefarious cycle.

The school system of the Amerikan Empire did teach a few reading and math skills. Most importantly however, those schools also taught more deceitful lessons.

The compulsory schooling scam has taught children about their low place in the social hierarchy, and how in order to ‘stay afloat in the world,’ the good student must lie, tolerate boredom, elicit favors, and maintain a false, hypocritical public persona.

The Amerikan state school has represented the most impressive institution for maintaining social control. As long as the Amerikan Empire continually murders and vomits out its casualties across this planet, this disguised jail system for children, adolescents and young adults, will rip apart and destroy its own sad victims.

History shall condemn such a monstruous institution clothed in the black robes of ideological deceit, or ‘educational policy.’ Compulsory State Education has forced millions of parents, under the terrible threats of the State, to hand over their own children for mind and personality mutilation.

The decade of the 850s BCE transformed into years of great agricultural harvests, the warm summers that always brought the good rains in the end. Some empires were on the move during this time too, such as the powerful Olmec city states, the Zhou Chinese feudal kingdoms, the military advances of the Neo-Assyrian Empire, and the growing naval power of the Phoenician city states along the Mediterranean.

Another city was growing too. They called themselves, Thebes, and many of the original warrior-nobles descended from some of the great pharaohs of Egypt, such as Ramses, and the great king of the rich city of Mycenae, called Midas. At least, those elites said this was true. The city also had strong fortified walls and had a high and central place on a thin strip of southern Hellas, or Greece. Its aristocrats possessed good reputations for fierce fighting – since many of them were also sexually involved with each other.

This city was also well-known for its peculiar sacraments in honor of its patron god, called Dionysus, or in the Roman name, Bacchus. The ceremonies for this god were not the typical devotions for the Greek gods, such as Apollo, Athena, Zeus, Ares-Mars and Hermes-Mercury. The supposed solemn religious services of Dionysus-Bacchus often transcended into furies of wild drinking, erotic dancing, rough eating and other sensual explorations.

His festival was during the late summer recollection of the wine fruit, the grapes, and their magical transformations into fermented joy. Men and women of public dignity could transcend into crazy barbarians. And they didn’t seem to care if these sensual transformations took place among the darkened frenzies.

Alcohol represents the most powerful and fastest working drug for personal transformation. This very strong fermented concoction contains the power to let go of mind shackles, which can lead into simple and beautiful joyousness. Alcohol’s peculiar pharmacological power explains its might and cultural influence in all world cultures and throughout world history, and even in world cultures that supposedly hate it, such as the Amerikan empire, Evangelical Christianity and Islamic fundamentalism.

But like any drug, it has its very own shackles and snares. The drug of alcohol must go with three important spirits in order for the drinker to reach his or her personal transformations towards letting go and simple joy. Alcohol has to coincide with the wonderful company of family and friends, the practices of celebration and carnival, and always have some good food to soak up the toxins that coexist with the tangy tastes of fermentation.

Around the year 405 BCE, a famous Greek tragedian, or playwright, wrote a piece called ‘The Bacchae.’ The work tells the story of King Pentheus of Thebes that tried to confront the God Dionysus who had visited his city and initiated the crazy worship dedicated to the sweet wine of excess. Pentheus tried to ban, repress, control and survey the decadence of alcohol, yet he ended up getting killed by his own mother, (while he was dressed in a woman’s costume), during the sacred rituals of overindulgence, violence and sensuality. Other ancient Greek rulers tried to ban Bacchus and his holy rites of alcohol drinking, such as King Perseus of Argos and King Lycurgus of Thracia. Like Pentheus, they all failed miserably trying to prohibit the sacred rituals associated with magical wine.

The moral of the theatrical story was clear: leave Bacchus alone, let the people enjoy themselves, don’t try to control and destroy the party – for partying represented a celebration of life, a celebration of the Dionysian spirit that has existed inside all of us.

The Roman Empire would also learn this hard historical lesson. Around the year 186 BCE, the Roman Senate, representing the Roman Republic, had enough of the night-time ceremonies, the secret initiates of drinking societies, and the excessive wildness of the Bacchanalia rites. Bacchus was one of the major Roman gods and there were statues and temples of him everywhere – but the rituals went too far.

Roman slaves acted like military commanders, and Roman women took on the roles of Roman dignitaries. The alcohol consumed during the festival flew beyond indulgence. The secretive initiation rites in order to enter the drinking societies possessed suspicious motivations. The sexual indiscretions after some hot dancing were often quite notorious. The ecstatic music of pipes and drums often brought young women into frenzies of lust and screaming. Every Bacchic celebratory season, there were always violent deaths and other nefarious acts reported. There even existed worshippers, called Bacchants, which only served Bacchus – and they even they dedicated their lives to the god through living in continual drunkenness and dissolution.

Eventually, the Senate had the Roman army exterminate the hard cores that fully lived their existences in Bacchic ecstasies. Bacchus represented an imported god from Greece, and supposedly had its origins from the Egyptians anyway. The Roman Republic destroyed some temples lest some Bacchanalia fanatics try to hide inside them under the protection of the god. New Roman laws prohibited the annual night-time conclaves of secret societies meeting outside of the city.

The Romans did value pragmatism, so they eventually allowed the annual Bacchic celebrations, but they had to support the normal rituals for the gods: sacred oblations and ceremonies in public view at the temple doors, while the rituals and music were open to the full community. The priests and musicians performed the rites both during the day and at night. About fifty years later however, the Roman Republic would disintegrate through its own orgies of violence called the Civil Wars.

And to this very actual day, world ideologies, world religions and world empires have waged a most horrible war against Bacchus. Evangelical Christianity, Psychobabble, Mormon Christianity and fundamentalist Islam still rail against the demonic drink.

But more ominously, since the beginning of the 20th century, the early 1900s, the Amerikan empire has continually waged a holy war against Bacchus and his magical fruits. Some of the more notorious examples have included, a National Prohibition Amendment against alcohol, (1920-1933), state liquor stores and liquor control boards, alcohol sin taxes, dry counties, bar closing hours, Sunday bans on selling beverages, maximum alcohol content laws for beer, banning the importation of Absinthe or the domestic production of corn liquor, raising the minimum wage to imbibe alcohol from 18 to 21, the restrictive Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, or the infamous ATF, and Surgeon Generals that continually fulminate against the drug. Finally, there is the maximum police action against alcohol, or supposedly against drunk drivers, called Mothers Against Drunk Driving, or really, the nation-wide police prohibition action against any drivers that happen to have any alcohol in their blood streams.

Millions of American citizens have lost their lives, both socially and physically, through such state institutional violence. During Prohibition, both the US and state governments purposefully poisoned sections of the ‘illegal’ alcohol supply in order to destroy lives and murder ‘disobedient and degenerate drinkers.’ The US government and state government’s war on DUIs has only helped extort great quantities of citizens’ personal finances and increase the bloated prison population, which is now the largest in the world in both real numbers and in percentage of prisoners to the general population.

Yet it is still quite dangerous to drive on the roads, and deadly accidents still happen regularly in the States. Like Pentheus and the Roman Senate of ancient history, the twisted state cycles versus alcohol are still flexing their muscles of control and legalized violence. But the six truths of history never change, so the same historical cycle has fallen upon the Amerikan empire. Violence is now endemic in American society. A few crazies even prefer the public acts of willful mass murder to any partying whatsoever.

One extreme often follows its opposite extreme. This historical truth has generally explained the attraction of some Communists for suddenly changing over to Fascist movements.

Millions of unfortunate people around the world have taken that other extreme with alcohol.They regularly drink the sacred and fermented juices into the private realms of slow and painful deaths. They drink when they rise, when bored, when they use the toilet, the shower, during work, watching TV, and even before they go to bed. Alcohol helps them pass through their pathetic lives that they truly hate. If they only were dead; instead they exist as alcoholics. Bacchus has given up on them too.

The joyful and liberating spirits of alcohol only flourish under the marvelous company of family and friends, the sensual delights of festivities and carnival, and the delightful tastes of good food. All three of these wonders of life taken together, will transform the Bacchic liquefied gift.

Alcohol opens doors into treasure lands of mental wonder and sensual adventure, and yet when easily overindulged, it is also an intoxication breathing poison, all of which drowns the mind of awareness.

The fateful year was 246 BCE, in the middle of January, Chinese New Year’s Day. And this day was truly an auspicious event. The calm winds did blow, and a new dynasty, the most powerful and yet, the shortest dynasty in Chinese history, had drunk from the poisoned cup of power. The great Chin Empire had arranged the sacred rituals for its grandiose reign. The infamous Black Emperor held tight to the wrath, once belonging to the worst of winters, and his holy name was, Ying Zheng.

Originally, the Chin rulers had fought as military knights under the great Zhou dynasty. But many centuries later, the Chin had finally received the mandate of Heaven, and like all new regimes and states built on the foundations of violence and legal crime, the emperor had a new capital built, called Xianyang on the western Wei River. Ying Zheng, as war commander and imperial Black Prince, took less than ten years to conquer all of his rival warlords and eventually unite the Middle Kingdom of China, both east and west, and north from the Yellow river to the south on the Yangtze river.

After Emperor Zheng’s sudden death about twelve years later, one of his sons, Zhao Zheng, or following his new name, Qin Shi Huang – the First Great Emperor, continued the Chin dynasty. He would last only a few years in power before his fateful assassination. The great Chin dynasty actually lasted only fifteen years, from 246-210 BCE.

Yet, this dynasty was the first to unite all the Chinas, the first to build on the Great Wall against the barbarians, the first to exterminate all the soldiers that knew the whereabouts of the Black Emperor, and then recreate them in lifelike quality in stone sculpture buried under the imperial sacred Earth. Chin Imperial power had first successfully used the political ideology of Legalism, under the advisers of Han Fei, Li Si, and Shang Yang.

Many philosophers and intellectuals in both antiquity and modern times have tried to formulate a theory, a law, or a truth that would explain to humanity the essence of human history. For some ancient historians, the understanding of history and conquest emerged from correct moral guidance, law systems, and aligning the actions of justice with fate or the Gods. Medieval historians often wrote about the attainment of both group discipline and group feeling, which enabled the triumph of the Spirit.

For others, it was the power of the Idea, the conception of the truth, while great leaders in history had obtained the access to the Eternal Mind, which led their empires and nations to victory. And for a few others, mostly of the Marxist persuasion, history was nothing but the struggle of social classes, where the poorer classes have been in constant war, movement and retreat versus the richer classes. All of these philosophers, intellectuals, and armchair historians were wrong.

The philosopher Nietzsche came the closest to understanding History, when he stated that history was not a subject worthy of study, for it was simply the study about how the strong, or the Masters, abused the weak, or the Slaves. This was true, but history has never been that simple. Humans have been very complex, have often thought too much, and have generally acted and reacted based on mental absurdities. But the cycles of history, and the rise and fall of great powers, empires, nations and states have all developed through the cultivation of the art of violence and the maintenance of such power. True power comes out of the genius, energy and will to do incredible acts of violence, brutality and cruelty.

All powerful state entities know this historical truth, including the sociopathic liars that now run the real United States Government-World Power. Historical entities that have fine tuned their methods of violence to greater legal webs of direction, such as prisons and concentration camps, massive laws codes, greater technological prowess in war, unbelievable controls in information and state secrets, amazing propaganda techniques, sophisticated uses of genocide, shocking acts of mass murder, various layers of legal state crimes, and the utter destruction of multiple enemies, have been the same entities that have triumphed through the attainment of power status on the world stage. Mao Tse Tung, the last known emperor of China, albeit a Communist one, stated that ‘all power comes out of the barrel of a gun.’ He was also partly right.

Violence has not just represented physical extermination, such as war, military divisions, guns, urban destruction, legal murder and state criminality. Violence has also signified institutional levels of brute force, such as laws, codes, work systems, schools, prisons, media propaganda, information gathering, intelligence spying, and surveillance mechanisms. The state apparatuses and empires that have successfully used and perfected all of those different levers of institutional violence have been the same empires that have achieved the most sublime victories on history’s pages for the battle of ideologies.

Think on the first great European empire, the Spanish Empire. At the beginning of the seventeenth-century, this Empire ‘where the sun had never set,’ had just murdered millions of indigenous people in the Caribbean, and yet it constructed a durable colonial regime from the Rio Colorado in New Mexico to the Rio Bio Bio in Chile for three hundred years. The ancient Assyrians also possessed great victories for hundreds of years, and they also held their special methods of torture and death in dealing with recalcitrant nobles that refused to respect them. The Chin Emperors of ancient China understood this truth fully through their ideological supports, called the Legalists.

For example, the Legalists advisers of the Chin ordered the confiscation of all illegal weapons. They also counseled the emperor on the nature of warfare, both internal and external. The emperor had to win the battle at all costs. The Chin also abolished hereditary noble privileges and they willfully executed scheming court eunuchs, massacred suspect villages and buried alive dishonest Confucian intellectuals. The Chin introduced forced labor conscription in order to build royal palaces, roads for war chariots, extensive canals, and gigantic walls that stretched thousands of miles in order to keep out the barbarians. They expelled non-Chinese foreigners and forcibly resettled minority cultures. The emperor did not just lounge in his palace, but he toured his empire on a war chariot accompanied by royal advisers and noble knights.

The Chin emperor forced the nobles into continual wars, so as to keep them occupied from parasitism. The Chin also employed the first court bureaucrats and did allow for some internal criticism. The emperors mandated a large family policy, larger agricultural tribute taxes, and the control of marriage partners, so that the poor would not marry the wealthy. The Great Emperor also demanded the burning of historical records with the final unification of Chinese legal and writing systems. According to the Legalists, the emperor kept a neutral stance on all policy, but his will reigned supreme handing out both punishments and favors, while he always favored the duress of the Law against favoritism and privileges.

After the overthrow of the Chin, another dynasty emerged to rule China. They had the name of the Han Dynasty, and unlike the Chin, they would rule for another 400 years. The Han emperors condemned the old Legalist methods of the Chin, but they also used similar violent methods in maintaining control. Sometimes the officials would cancel taxes, and other times they raised them. Sometimes the officials increased the number of laws, and other times they did not enforce them. The Han Chinese attacked Manchuria, Annam, (northern Vietnam), Mongolia and Korea, in order to expand their empire. The Han used Confucian scholars over Legalists, yet for the posterity of history, they used the same methods of violence and legal crime in order to keep up their power.

The historical lesson is simple. All states that want to advance in power and grasp their historical glory must increase their deeds of violence, brutality, criminality and cruelty. Violence does get the results, because the State, as historical entity, bathes in its own power to commit admissible violence and legal crime. There is no way to have a state without acts of torture, rape, imprisonment and murder. This truth goes for all states: democratic or parliamentary, republican or dictatorial, monarchic or oligarchic, theocracies or socialist juntas. Whether the methods are coup d’états or elections, resignations or palace revolts, the activities of the state speak only to unrestrained violence. Human culture changes, but the state has never changed – nor will it ever.